Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés

Abstract

Duchamp apparently belongs to an artistic movement which is known with many names as Dadaism, Surrealism or also Anti-art. One of his most famous masterpieces, Mona Lisa’s image with “doorknob and mustache” or with “goat beard” cataloged him as a clear iconoclast in art’s field, but also condemned him, in a certain way, to be ejected from typical books of History of Art. In the next pages, in first place, I’ll describe briefly, since a perspective of History of Art, Duchamp’s biography. In second place, I’ll remit to the categories that developed Ortega y Gasset about vanguard art in his book La deshumanización del arte written in 1924. In third place, helped with those categories and information about Duchamp’s work and life, I’ll try to decipher the enigma from Duchamp painting Étant Donnés —which appears as illustration in the cover of my book Fenomenología y Antropología, published in Argentina in 1997—, trying to understand its possible function for an introduction into phenomenology’s problematic.